Story Highlights

ER's Anthony Edwards returns to TV in ABC's Zero Hour, a Da Vinci Code-style thriller due on ABC Feb. 14. He plays Hank Galliston, a paranormal enthusiast who runs a skeptics' magazine but is drawn into a vast mystery when his wife is abducted. The search involves clocks crafted in the 1930s that hide secrets, Nazis, a church and its priest (Charles S. Dutton) and a villain (Michael Nyqvist) who's out to reclaim one of the timepieces that's fallen into Hank's hands.

"I said I would never do a one-hour television show again; I was done," Edwards says. "It took awhile to recover" from his long run on NBC's hit medical drama. And he moved to New York with his family, where the new show is being filmed (though its snowy pilot episode was shot in Montreal). But when executive producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura (Transformers) came calling with a script, "I could not put it down. Every script has been a surprise," and Hank is "as bewildered as the audience is."

In Zero's hour, things aren't often what they seem. As Hank searches for his wife, Laila (Jacinda Barrett), and why she's been kidnapped, the emphasis "switches to the question of who is she and how is she involved in this," she says.

Serialized mysteries often have a hard time finding devoted fans who worry low ratings will doom them before the mystery is solved. That's especially true for predecessors in Zero's competitive Thursday at 8 ET/PT time slot, where Last Resort stumbled this fall, as did earlier projects from Flash Forward to Missing. But "this entire Nazi conspiracy thing will be done at the end of 13 episodes," says creator Paul Scheuring (Prison Break), so viewers won't be forced to wait for closure: In success, Hank will track a new mystery in a second season.